Lively

We smuggled a trip in between treatments. We drove to a place called Lively, surrounded by a smoldering fire of color flaring in the leaves and in the rocks, which were streaked with glistening quartz. We got to see the enormous steel Nickel and the Super Stack, where the underground mines puff their smoke into the clouds through a 1200 foot concrete cigar.

We had given Kath and Larr a few hours warning. They had said, "Come! Just don't mind the house," which we never do, but they had cleaned up anyway, so the joke all weekend was, "Quick, make it look nice. The Thiessens are coming!" She even managed to bake an extra pie.

How many people do you have in your life that make room like that? That move over on the bench and let you slide in at the table? And it was a good table, laden with friendships and good will. Saturday night our friends (they are from Niagara but moved to serve in a church in Sudbury) were helping out at a church fund-raiser, a lavish turkey dinner for 300 people with all the fixings. Robert spent four hours outside under a tent helping Larry and three other guys cook the vegetables. When the rain slanting under the tent got to them, they stood under the church awning to give the rain its space. When I asked Robert what he had liked most about the weekend, this is what he mentioned first--getting to know these men, friends of friends, that would stand out in the cold and cook. My first instinct is to want to see only those I already know. Silly me.

Sunday it was back to church. The team that had helped build a home in Nicaragua told their stories, and there were tears because the Nicaraguan family building alongside them faced difficulties, and the Canadians didn't know how they were coping. After the worship, there was more food downstairs. A woman stopped me in the stairwell to ask if I were Larry's sister. We're both bald, you know. I said yes. He said no. She laughed because of course we were both right. She said she was glad to meet me and that I glowed. The radiation is not supposed to do that, but what do the doctors know? I wasn't feeling especially cheerful in this new place surrounded by strangers. Until she said that.

And until Kath's friend Pam welcomed me. And her friend Alyson asked me, "Why do you wear that cap?" and I told her, and she said with her very short hair, "Sit down" in that startling Scottish accent she has, and we exchanged stories (she has more experience in this journey than I do), and we talked too long so that the family left me behind, and I had to go home with the minister, who understood.

And until Caleb, their son, who reminds me of Philip, sat down and watched The Imitation Game with me and all my literary observations (you can tell the genre and outcome of the movie by the opening scores of music) because unlike the rest of the family, he couldn't go help with the turkey dinner because he had just broken his wrist and had to take care, so we stayed home with the two dogs who never wanted to be left out of anything and watched the movie with us, facing the wrong way.

And until Robert made friends with the man behind him in the turkey dinner line, an Indian man with long grey hair in a pony-tail who keeps bees and can interpret their buzzes when they call from the hives (a bee whisperer). Did you know there are Russian bees that love winter? Kath invited the man and his wife home to dinner, and they came, and we learned about bees and many other things.

And it snowed that very afternoon, just for the sake of the Russian bees. It snowed after we took a walk beside the river, where beavers come up on the bank and make trails to the white birches and chomp on them with their teeth. I wanted to see one. I wanted to see a lodge. But Larry explained that beavers weren't the only thing to come up the bank and startle you as you walk. Cashew, the yellow lab, had startled a bear. So I was content with Cashew splashing into the cold river and coming back out alone without the bear. Kath had told us that when you count to three, Cashew jumps into any water available, and so of course Robert had to experiment, and of course Cashew jumped and brought half the cold river back with him and shook. This is the Lively dog that lived in the Lively family that went to the Lively church that breathed the air of the Lively town that made room for the Thiessens that needed somewhere to be between radiation treatments.